11 ms·

Princeton bans academics from handing copyright to journal publishers

414 points by jamesbritt 15y ago

mhb 15y ago
Sounds good, but a truck-sized loophole? In cases where the journal refuses to publish their article without the academic handing all copyright to the publisher, the academic can seek a waiver from the open access policy from the University. The policy authors acknowledged that this may make the rule toothless in practice but said open access policies can be used “to lean on the journals to adjust their standard contracts so that waivers are not required, or with a limited waiver that simply delays open access for a few months.”
- shabble 15y ago
  Make the application procedure time and effort consuming (Although I can't imagine how university policies could be anything but) and hope to induce researchers to submit to publications that don't require the waiver. It's a bit unfair to the actual researchers, but if they start putting pressure on the journal publishers -- "Sorry, you've got a high impact factor and I'd love to publish with you, but I can't justify the 2 weeks of fighting with the bureaucracy about a waiver" -- and you might see some progress. Or their grad students will get another shitty task piled on their list. Hmmmmm.
coliveira 15y ago
Princeton is not the first institution to do this, and many publishers have been flexible if you don't want to handle copyright for your work. I think this won't change much because academics are still required to publish in the same journals, and references are made to journal publications instead of web sites. Even today one can easily post papers in their personal website without problems.
- shabble 15y ago
  I tend to grab the paper title and search for it as a literal string, and in the majority of cases, the only full version available is behind a journal paywall. Sometimes, especially in CS, you get lucky and find a citeseer or personal-page copy, but anything IEE(E) is pretty rare IME.
- kragen 15y ago
  What other institutions do this?
  - coliveira 15y ago
    I know about AT&T Labs. There are others with similar requirements, and publishers know this.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
kragen 15y ago
This is an interesting case where you can improve your negotiating leverage by giving up freedom. Consider a researcher who wants their research to be open access. They can attempt to negotiate this every time they send a paper to a journal, but most researchers are not in a very strong negotiating position relative to the journal. Or they can accept a postdoc position at Princeton, which now means that every time they submit a paper, they must inform the journal that unfortunately they cannot assign copyright. There are many journals who would be willing to decline to publish the papers of an individual intransigent researcher. There are not many journals who would be willing to ban papers from Princeton entirely. As an example, Dan Bernstein, who is certainly a well-respected researcher in his field, has individually adopted a policy of dedicating his papers to the public domain so that, like researchers employed by the US Government, he cannot assign copyright in them. The IEEE has consequently decided to reject his papers even when its referees accept them, even though they accept papers from US Government researchers: http://cr.yp.to/writing/ieee.html http://cr.yp.to/writing/ieee.html This kind of phenomenon, where giving up freedom improves your negotiating position, was extensively studied by Schelling in his theory of negotiation. It's also very relevant to the debate over Treacherous (or "Trusted") Computing, signed bootloaders, and the like. You might prefer not to have the option of cryptographically certifying to Warner Music that your machine is running an approved operating system on approved hardware. That's because if you have that option, they might not sell you music unless you exercise it, probably giving up many of the rights you have under copyright law; while if you don't have that option, they are faced with a less tempting choice of only selling you a CD. Advocates of these systems sometimes design systems where you have full freedom to run either signed or unsigned software, claiming that this makes their systems safe from abuse. This overlooks this phenomenon, where having a freedom makes you subject to pressure to exercise it.
- Symmetry 15y ago
  I quite agree, and think that anyone who participates on Hacker News would probably get a lot out of reading Schelling's book The Strategy of Conflict.
  - kragen 15y ago
DanielBMarkham 15y ago
...The policy authors acknowledged that this may make the rule toothless in practice... Er, hello? If the policy is just a paper tiger, perhaps that fact should go in the title? I think this is a great step, but if it's largely symbolic, that's a pretty important part of the story and doesn't deserve to be in paragraph 10 I'm left questioning how much is real and how much is spin, which is not where I want to be as a reader.
trdlo 15y ago
This is to be applauded but it needs to go a step further. What is really needed is for all the academics to agree to retain their own copyright because they, the authors, are the natural holders of it. Worldwide, they ultimately have a much bigger clout than any university. Under this Princeton proposal, though well meant, one exploiter (the publisher) will just be replaced by another (the institution). The arrogant wording: 'Staff will grant to The Trustees of Princeton University “a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise any and all copyrights in his or her scholarly articles published in any medium, whether now known or later invented, provided the articles are not sold by the University for a profit, and to authorise others to do the same.” ought to ring the warning bells. What happens if some staff do not want to do this, for whatever legitimate reasons of their own? Not to mention the innocent little lawyers' trick of adding 'or later invented', thus essentially appropriating their poor members' entire life's work in advance? Let me repeat the obvious: it is the author who holds the rights. The institution may politely ask for them but it can not unilaterally formulate its own policy to usurp those rights.
StevanHarnad 15y ago
LIKE ITS HARVARD MODEL, PRINCETON'S OPEN ACCESS POLICY NEEDS TO ADD AN IMMEDIATE-DEPOSIT REQUIREMENT, WITH NO WAIVER OPTION http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/844-guid.html http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/844-guid.h... 1. First, congratulations to Princeton University (my graduate alma mater!) for adopting an open access mandate: a copyright-reservation policy, adopted by unanimous faculty vote. 2. Princeton is following in the footsteps of Harvard in adopting the copyright-reservation policy pioneered by Stuart Shieber and Peter Suber. 4. I hope that Princeton will now also follow in the footsteps of Harvard by adding an immediate-deposit requirement with no waiver option to its copyright-reservation mandate, as Harvard has done. 5. The Princeton copyright-reservation policy, like the Harvard copyright-reservation policy, can be waived if the author wishes: This is to allow authors to retain the freedom to choose where to publish, even if the journal does not agree to the copyright-reservation. 6. Adding an immediate-deposit clause, with no opt-out waiver option, retains all the properties and benefits of the copyright-reservation policy while ensuring that all articles are nevertheless deposited in the institutional repository upon publication, with no exceptions: Access to the deposited article can be embargoed, but deposit itself cannot; access is a copyright matter, deposit is not. 7. Depositing all articles upon publication, without exception, is crucial to reaching 100% open access with certainty, and as soon as possible; hence it is the right example to set for the many other universities worldwide that are now contemplating emulating Harvard and Princeton by adopting open access policies of their own; copyright reservation alone, with opt-out, is not. 8. The reason it is imperative that the deposit clause must be immediate and without a waiver option is that, without that, both when and whether articles are deposited at all is indeterminate: With the added deposit requirement the policy is a mandate; without it, it is just a gentleman/scholar's agreement. [Footnote: Princeton's open access policy is also unusual in having been adopted before Princeton has created an open access repository for its authors to deposit in: It might be a good idea to create the repository as soon as possible so Princeton authors can get into the habit of practising what they pledge from the outset...] Stevan Harnad EnablingOpenScholarship
jforman 15y ago
A little known fact: the vast majority of grants (by volume of cash) are technically awarded to the professor's university rather than to the professor him/herself, giving the university broad control over the product of the professor's research. At least, this is the case in the life sciences. From time to time, this yields something good. Props to the grad school I dropped out of :)
- lutorm 15y ago
  This is because to be eligible for a grant, you need to be certified to comply with the federal rules. In most cases, this is done by the university getting the grant, but there are companies that will do this for you for a fee, and even examples where independent researchers have started an "institute" that has been certified. The advantage of the latter alternatives is of course that the administrative overhead is a small fraction of what a large research university charges.
- impendia 15y ago
  And don't forget about the 40% the university skims off the top (aka "indirect costs").
  - larsberg 15y ago
    Overhead on grants is > 50%. The exact rate is negotiated between your university and its major funding agency (NSF or NIH), depending on which provides more grant money in total to your institution. That rate is then used uniformly across all grants.
    - Estragon 15y ago
      Yes, Universities have become fiscalized to an extent. They increasingly behave more like businesses whose purpose is to extract grant money from the government than institutions committed to learning and research. "The Heart of Research is Sick" http://www.labtimes.org/labtimes/issues/lt2011/lt02/lt_2011_02_24_31.pdf http://www.labtimes.org/labtimes/issues/lt2011/lt02/lt_2011_... Essentially, it’s the publication process. It has become a system of collecting counters for particular purposes – to get grants, to get tenure, etc. – rather than to communicate and illuminate findings to other people. The literature is, by and large, unreadable. It’s all written in a kind of code, with inappropriate data in large amounts, and the storyline is becoming increasingly orchestrated by this need to publish. We all know it. We all suffer from it. I think the changes to the scientific enterprise have been inexorable and progressive. The deterioration has been so steady that people don’t really realise how much things have changed.
BonoboBoner 15y ago
Sometimes I think the academic publishing mechanisms are broken. It takes so much time for your idea and research to be visible... you write the paper, it get reviewed, presented on a conference, published in journals and then months/years later someone actually sees it. Compare that to the web, where an elaborate blog post and a project on GitHub is enough to become visible to the entire world within hours. Percentage wise, how much influence did academic papers have on your day to day work in the last year compared to new stuff you found on the web?
- carbocation 15y ago
  I'm trying to understand your concern. While the general public may not interface with new research until it gets published, the researcher's colleagues typically hear about big findings within weeks, or at worst months (conferences). If you're not in field X, you won't hear about new research until later. But if you're not in field X, how often does it matter that you weren't on the bleeding edge of something in that field?
- copper 15y ago
  Perhaps as a counterexample: in my day to day work, I write numerical code. Academic papers are still a better influence as compared to stuff that can be found directly on the web. To be fair, given that a lot more academics are making their work available on their websites, and I can see where this situation might reverse in the not-so-distant future.
- ollysb 15y ago
  Is there any reason why publications can't be publicly available before they are reviewed? The journals could still play the same role, highlighting the most significant publications. I'm not an academic so I'm not familiar with the feedback process between a journal and a paper's author. Is there any reason that any refinements couldn't take place in public. A version of github focused on academic papers would seem like a good model.
  - impendia 15y ago
    There's nothing preventing professors from posting papers to their website or the arXiv. I imagine you could incorporate revisions if you liked. (And my "I imagine", I mean "I did this when I published papers in the past".) This is probably against the letter of the copyright agreement, but I don't give a damn, and AFAIK publishers don't dare go after people who do this.
URSpider94 15y ago
It's my understanding that research done at government labs comes with a similar restriction, and that it's been standard practice for years for these researchers to reserve copyright on their publications. If that's true, then this will give Princeton researchers the leverage they need to retain copyright to their publications. Even though there's theoretically a waiver process, I'm going to bet that most authors won't want to go through that process, since the work is more valuable to them if they retain the ability to distribute it themselves.
- jforman 15y ago
  Government employees' work by law is in the public domain: "Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government, but the United States Government is not precluded from receiving and holding copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise." (17 U.S.C. § 105) "A 'work of the United States Government' is a work prepared by an officer or employee of the United States Government as part of that person’s official duties." (17 U.S.C. § 101) ...although I disagree that the pressure to give away copyright is weak. At least in the life sciences, the prestige you get from a publication in, say, Nature or Science is far more valuable than the work alone.
robryan 15y ago
I think there still definitely needs to be some sort of filter for academic research. Probably not the journal system anymore but something has to replace it, as most don't have time to trawl through things of questionable quality in the hope of finding something useful.
- jsmcgd 15y ago
  The existing academic journals could certify only the works that meet their existing publishing criteria, and charge for this service, whilst making all works freely available. No one is restricted, and everyone knows where to go to avoid having to trawl through the dross themselves.
- tzs 15y ago
  What I think might be good would be something like this. It's based on the notion that being a good researcher and being good at reading and reviewing research papers are not necessarily the same skill. 1. Have a place for open publication, like arxiv.org, but with a system of non-anonymous commenting and rating. So if someone puts a paper there, others can comment on it and rate it. Ratings could include several categories, such as clarity, importance, rigor, and so on. 2. There should be a system to rate the reviewers. 3. Out of this would emerge a growing collection of reviewers who are recognized as being very good at reviewing papers. 4. Reviewers would start publishing lists of papers they have recently reviewed, broken down by field. 5. Scientists would subscribe to these lists from the top reviewers in their field. 6. Reviewing could become a profession. A researcher who wants to make sure his paper gets attention could pay one or more high rated reviewers to review it. Note that for reviewers it is important to maintain a reputation as an accurate and honest reviewer, which I think would be enough of a safe guard against authors being able to buy good reviews for bad papers.
  - impendia 15y ago
    This is a good idea, but I think even something much simpler along these lines would work. If arXiv allowed for signed comments, then famous people could say as little as "This is an interesting paper, and everyone interested in X should read it", and that would do a lot for the reputations of unknown people who are doing good work.
ernesth 15y ago
From Springer's "copyright transer statement": An author may self-archive an author-created version of his/her article on his/her own website. He/she may also deposit this version on his/her institution's and funder's repository at the funder request or as a result of a legal obligation... Many publishers have a similar clause. My institution (a french research institute) also requires me to put my publications on their public repository and it does not create problems for journals in CS. Non-false title may be "Princeton bans publishers from handling copyright to journal publishers who ban authors from publishing their articles on their website."
- crocowhile 15y ago
  The key word here is "author-created version". After publication you are allowed to put a preprint version of your manuscript on your website but you can't upload the PDF of your final paper. Most people do that anyway but it's technically not allowed. Princeton wants to stop this.
  - anghyflawn 15y ago
    Again, it varies by publisher. For instance, CUP (at least for the type of journals that I read) allows the author to put up a preprint (before peer review) or a postprint (after review but before editing) on a personal page or the institutional repository immediately on acceptance; once the final version is available on their website (I think), you can also put it up on your own page; and once a year has passed after publication, you can also upload it to the repository. It's not optimal, but it's much better than nothing.
    - streptomycin 15y ago
      It does vary widely from publisher to publisher. Here is a database of publisher policies on this issue: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/ http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/
  - ernesth 15y ago
    So that means Princeton requires publishers to hand all their copyright to Princeton? Not that it adds much value but the published article contains the logo of the publisher, some work done by the publisher's typesetters and occasionnaly other copyrighted materials.
movingahead 15y ago
From a student point of view, this is great news. If you don't have a personal subscription to the digital libraries of IEEE/ACM, the amount of hoops that one has to go through to access a research paper, is apalling. I believe that a peer review system used by journals is beneficial, but putting the papers behind a paywall is obstructing access to knowledge. If anyone has a reference which justifies the paywall charges, please share it.
- jessriedel 15y ago
  I think "appalling" is a bit of hyperbole. I'm for open access, but students at almost every major university can get all the journal articles they want for free at their library. In addition, many/most school have a proxy system so the student can access these resources from home. The situation is a lot worse for the general public, although even then many public libraries have subscriptions to the largest journals.
  - pradocchia 15y ago
    students at almost every major university can get all the journal articles they want for free at their library. Some of us have finished school and left the academy, but would still like to read an journal article from time to time.
    - jessriedel 15y ago
      movingahead's comment started with "From a student point of view...", and that was the area I was discussing.
      - pradocchia 15y ago
        From context, he appears to mean "one who studies", rather than "one who's in school."
  - Anechoic 15y ago
    > although even then many public libraries have subscriptions to the largest journals. Maybe public libraries in the largest of cities but I've never seen this in libraries in medium-sized (100,000-250,000 people) Massachusetts cities.
chalst 15y ago
With much the same effect, MIT and Harvard have demand the right to make available their researcher's publications, with a similar opt-out clause. The experience is that the opt-out does get used a fair bit in biomed.
a3_nm 15y ago
It's not as good as the title says. The journal publishers will still own the copyright, they will just have to license some rights to the university.
- amirhhz 15y ago
  From the article: "academic staff will grant to The Trustees of Princeton University “a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise any and all copyrights in his or her scholarly articles published in any medium, whether now known or later invented, provided the articles are not sold by the University for a profit, and to authorise others to do the same.”" That means unless a waiver is given, it doesn't matter what the journal does or thinks, the university can publish the material anyway it likes. A compromise of sorts, but the effect is that more people potentially have access.
  - itsnotvalid 15y ago
    If more universities support this kind of policies, the momentum could break the current problem of priced access to results of research that are not in any way, paid by the journal publishers. As indicated by the article, peer reviewers are not paid for that, and so merely the editors are paid in due course. However, charging for the price of what an article needs, is far from what the cost could really justify itself with. Just have a thought, do we really need journal publishers these days? It was once a time we don't have any means than print publishing to exchange views, now we have the series of tubes to do so.
    - william42 15y ago
      The main thing the journals produce is prestige.
      - PotatoEngineer 15y ago
        That, and reliability. You're assured that some kind of peer-review happened, at some point, and that some standards were met. What standards, and what kind of peer review, will differ per journal.
joelthelion 15y ago
The problem with this approach is that smaller universities can't afford to do this. I think this problem needs to be adressed at funding agency level, with funding agencies requiring that all publication be made available on the agency's website.
- arohner 15y ago
  Why? What are the costs, aside from an http server that hosts PDFs?
  - kragen 15y ago
    The cost is that if Podunk University in Podunk, Texas adopts Princeton's policy, Elsevier and Wiley can simply decline to publish anything written by the three Ph.D.s on their faculty. That will make it difficult for Podunk to attract a fourth Ph.D., and even the three it has may choose to give up tenure there in search of someplace they can publish. However, if a few big universities follow Princeton's lead here, that cost will disappear.
- Lewisham 15y ago
  You might be interested in a rather spirited debate with the head of the ACM here: https://plus.google.com/117898054357703859389/posts/b783VnN45DD https://plus.google.com/117898054357703859389/posts/b783VnN4...
- impendia 15y ago
  +1 to you, but somebody needed to make the first move, and I think most professors at smaller universities would be happy to publish wherever professors at Princeton are publishing.
  - elehack 15y ago
    In some fields, I think this may have huge impact. No math or CS journal would want to be unable to accept Princeton publications. Even if publishers make exemptions rather than change their policies, it sets a precedent that exemptions can be made for institutional requirements.
itsnotvalid 15y ago
I can't say how much I like this ban. For so many times since I left school and wanted to read an article or so, and be greeted with "summary" of that article. I don't really need to pay $25, for the fact that the journal may have obtained the copyright and sold it to some journal sites. We could use some open-source concepts for paper publishing.
- davidblair 15y ago
  arxiv.org has >700,000 open access articles in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics. It's a great resource. The major cost of a journal is the peer review process, editing, and printing. This can really take a substantial portion of someones time. I don't think it justifies a $25 (sometimes over $40) fee to see an article printed 8 years ago though.
  - inuhj 15y ago
    What journal pays scientists to peer review?
  - ggchappell 15y ago
    > The major cost of a journal is the peer review process, editing, and printing. Nope, just printing. Peer review is unpaid. In technical fields, at least, editing these days is done by the author (and/or whoever assists at the author's institution) and sometimes by peer reviewers. With LaTeX being standard, the author even does the great majority of the typesetting work. None of these people are funded by the journal. So you are certainly right about the time required; but the people who spend all this time never see that money. Now forget the paper version and just put it all on the web, and we see that an academic journal can be run very cheaply indeed.
    - davidblair 15y ago
      I phrased that poorly. You are absolutely right, peer reviewers are unpaid. I also have a big problem with the fact that journals receive a perpetual copyright to the work instead of it becoming an open license 6-months to a year after publication. Returning to the cost issue. The cost I am referring to comes from paying for the software to manage the peer review process and the time it takes to build the relationships to have enough reviewers available to deal with the first submission and the revision that will almost likely occur. To put out a single issue with 20 articles can easily involve 50 reviewers and at least 40 authors. It is the social science and humanities journals that have real problems with getting papers ready for print. It's easy to only think about scientific journals but the reality is a great deal of researchers only have sufficient computer skills. They will write a professional paper and do the best they can to format it but it isn't anywhere near ready to send to the printers. Large journals can easily cover these costs. Small journals are really struggling to get by. I hear small journal editors talking about how long they will be able to survive. They want to make it work but just don't know how. It's not an easy problem to solve.
impendia 15y ago
Clicking through to the response from Wiley and Elsevier is interesting. Wiley: "Naturally, we are concerned that posting the final versions of published articles in Open Access and institutional repositories lacking viable business models may have an adverse impact on the business of scholarly communication." TL;DR: Universities should continue to pay us, because otherwise we won't make any money.

414 points by jamesbritt 15y ago

mhb 15y ago

Sounds good, but a truck-sized loophole? In cases where the journal refuses to publish their article without the academic handing all copyright to the publisher, the academic can seek a waiver from the open access policy from the University. The policy authors acknowledged that this may make the rule toothless in practice but said open access policies can be used “to lean on the journals to adjust their standard contracts so that waivers are not required, or with a limited waiver that simply delays open access for a few months.”

shabble 15y ago
Make the application procedure time and effort consuming (Although I can't imagine how university policies could be anything but) and hope to induce researchers to submit to publications that don't require the waiver. It's a bit unfair to the actual researchers, but if they start putting pressure on the journal publishers -- "Sorry, you've got a high impact factor and I'd love to publish with you, but I can't justify the 2 weeks of fighting with the bureaucracy about a waiver" -- and you might see some progress. Or their grad students will get another shitty task piled on their list. Hmmmmm.

coliveira 15y ago

Princeton is not the first institution to do this, and many publishers have been flexible if you don't want to handle copyright for your work. I think this won't change much because academics are still required to publish in the same journals, and references are made to journal publications instead of web sites. Even today one can easily post papers in their personal website without problems.

shabble 15y ago
I tend to grab the paper title and search for it as a literal string, and in the majority of cases, the only full version available is behind a journal paywall. Sometimes, especially in CS, you get lucky and find a citeseer or personal-page copy, but anything IEE(E) is pretty rare IME.
kragen 15y ago
What other institutions do this?
- coliveira 15y ago
  I know about AT&T Labs. There are others with similar requirements, and publishers know this.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

kragen 15y ago

This is an interesting case where you can improve your negotiating leverage by giving up freedom. Consider a researcher who wants their research to be open access. They can attempt to negotiate this every time they send a paper to a journal, but most researchers are not in a very strong negotiating position relative to the journal. Or they can accept a postdoc position at Princeton, which now means that every time they submit a paper, they must inform the journal that unfortunately they cannot assign copyright. There are many journals who would be willing to decline to publish the papers of an individual intransigent researcher. There are not many journals who would be willing to ban papers from Princeton entirely. As an example, Dan Bernstein, who is certainly a well-respected researcher in his field, has individually adopted a policy of dedicating his papers to the public domain so that, like researchers employed by the US Government, he cannot assign copyright in them. The IEEE has consequently decided to reject his papers even when its referees accept them, even though they accept papers from US Government researchers: http://cr.yp.to/writing/ieee.html http://cr.yp.to/writing/ieee.html This kind of phenomenon, where giving up freedom improves your negotiating position, was extensively studied by Schelling in his theory of negotiation. It's also very relevant to the debate over Treacherous (or "Trusted") Computing, signed bootloaders, and the like. You might prefer not to have the option of cryptographically certifying to Warner Music that your machine is running an approved operating system on approved hardware. That's because if you have that option, they might not sell you music unless you exercise it, probably giving up many of the rights you have under copyright law; while if you don't have that option, they are faced with a less tempting choice of only selling you a CD. Advocates of these systems sometimes design systems where you have full freedom to run either signed or unsigned software, claiming that this makes their systems safe from abuse. This overlooks this phenomenon, where having a freedom makes you subject to pressure to exercise it.

Symmetry 15y ago
I quite agree, and think that anyone who participates on Hacker News would probably get a lot out of reading Schelling's book The Strategy of Conflict.
- kragen 15y ago

DanielBMarkham 15y ago

...The policy authors acknowledged that this may make the rule toothless in practice... Er, hello? If the policy is just a paper tiger, perhaps that fact should go in the title? I think this is a great step, but if it's largely symbolic, that's a pretty important part of the story and doesn't deserve to be in paragraph 10 I'm left questioning how much is real and how much is spin, which is not where I want to be as a reader.

trdlo 15y ago

This is to be applauded but it needs to go a step further. What is really needed is for all the academics to agree to retain their own copyright because they, the authors, are the natural holders of it. Worldwide, they ultimately have a much bigger clout than any university. Under this Princeton proposal, though well meant, one exploiter (the publisher) will just be replaced by another (the institution). The arrogant wording: 'Staff will grant to The Trustees of Princeton University “a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise any and all copyrights in his or her scholarly articles published in any medium, whether now known or later invented, provided the articles are not sold by the University for a profit, and to authorise others to do the same.” ought to ring the warning bells. What happens if some staff do not want to do this, for whatever legitimate reasons of their own? Not to mention the innocent little lawyers' trick of adding 'or later invented', thus essentially appropriating their poor members' entire life's work in advance? Let me repeat the obvious: it is the author who holds the rights. The institution may politely ask for them but it can not unilaterally formulate its own policy to usurp those rights.

StevanHarnad 15y ago

LIKE ITS HARVARD MODEL, PRINCETON'S OPEN ACCESS POLICY NEEDS TO ADD AN IMMEDIATE-DEPOSIT REQUIREMENT, WITH NO WAIVER OPTION http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/844-guid.html http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/844-guid.h... 1. First, congratulations to Princeton University (my graduate alma mater!) for adopting an open access mandate: a copyright-reservation policy, adopted by unanimous faculty vote. 2. Princeton is following in the footsteps of Harvard in adopting the copyright-reservation policy pioneered by Stuart Shieber and Peter Suber. 4. I hope that Princeton will now also follow in the footsteps of Harvard by adding an immediate-deposit requirement with no waiver option to its copyright-reservation mandate, as Harvard has done. 5. The Princeton copyright-reservation policy, like the Harvard copyright-reservation policy, can be waived if the author wishes: This is to allow authors to retain the freedom to choose where to publish, even if the journal does not agree to the copyright-reservation. 6. Adding an immediate-deposit clause, with no opt-out waiver option, retains all the properties and benefits of the copyright-reservation policy while ensuring that all articles are nevertheless deposited in the institutional repository upon publication, with no exceptions: Access to the deposited article can be embargoed, but deposit itself cannot; access is a copyright matter, deposit is not. 7. Depositing all articles upon publication, without exception, is crucial to reaching 100% open access with certainty, and as soon as possible; hence it is the right example to set for the many other universities worldwide that are now contemplating emulating Harvard and Princeton by adopting open access policies of their own; copyright reservation alone, with opt-out, is not. 8. The reason it is imperative that the deposit clause must be immediate and without a waiver option is that, without that, both when and whether articles are deposited at all is indeterminate: With the added deposit requirement the policy is a mandate; without it, it is just a gentleman/scholar's agreement. [Footnote: Princeton's open access policy is also unusual in having been adopted before Princeton has created an open access repository for its authors to deposit in: It might be a good idea to create the repository as soon as possible so Princeton authors can get into the habit of practising what they pledge from the outset...] Stevan Harnad EnablingOpenScholarship

jforman 15y ago

A little known fact: the vast majority of grants (by volume of cash) are technically awarded to the professor's university rather than to the professor him/herself, giving the university broad control over the product of the professor's research. At least, this is the case in the life sciences. From time to time, this yields something good. Props to the grad school I dropped out of :)

lutorm 15y ago
This is because to be eligible for a grant, you need to be certified to comply with the federal rules. In most cases, this is done by the university getting the grant, but there are companies that will do this for you for a fee, and even examples where independent researchers have started an "institute" that has been certified. The advantage of the latter alternatives is of course that the administrative overhead is a small fraction of what a large research university charges.
impendia 15y ago
And don't forget about the 40% the university skims off the top (aka "indirect costs").
- larsberg 15y ago
  Overhead on grants is > 50%. The exact rate is negotiated between your university and its major funding agency (NSF or NIH), depending on which provides more grant money in total to your institution. That rate is then used uniformly across all grants.
  - Estragon 15y ago
    Yes, Universities have become fiscalized to an extent. They increasingly behave more like businesses whose purpose is to extract grant money from the government than institutions committed to learning and research. "The Heart of Research is Sick" http://www.labtimes.org/labtimes/issues/lt2011/lt02/lt_2011_02_24_31.pdf http://www.labtimes.org/labtimes/issues/lt2011/lt02/lt_2011_... Essentially, it’s the publication process. It has become a system of collecting counters for particular purposes – to get grants, to get tenure, etc. – rather than to communicate and illuminate findings to other people. The literature is, by and large, unreadable. It’s all written in a kind of code, with inappropriate data in large amounts, and the storyline is becoming increasingly orchestrated by this need to publish. We all know it. We all suffer from it. I think the changes to the scientific enterprise have been inexorable and progressive. The deterioration has been so steady that people don’t really realise how much things have changed.

BonoboBoner 15y ago

Sometimes I think the academic publishing mechanisms are broken. It takes so much time for your idea and research to be visible... you write the paper, it get reviewed, presented on a conference, published in journals and then months/years later someone actually sees it. Compare that to the web, where an elaborate blog post and a project on GitHub is enough to become visible to the entire world within hours. Percentage wise, how much influence did academic papers have on your day to day work in the last year compared to new stuff you found on the web?

carbocation 15y ago
I'm trying to understand your concern. While the general public may not interface with new research until it gets published, the researcher's colleagues typically hear about big findings within weeks, or at worst months (conferences). If you're not in field X, you won't hear about new research until later. But if you're not in field X, how often does it matter that you weren't on the bleeding edge of something in that field?
copper 15y ago
Perhaps as a counterexample: in my day to day work, I write numerical code. Academic papers are still a better influence as compared to stuff that can be found directly on the web. To be fair, given that a lot more academics are making their work available on their websites, and I can see where this situation might reverse in the not-so-distant future.
ollysb 15y ago
Is there any reason why publications can't be publicly available before they are reviewed? The journals could still play the same role, highlighting the most significant publications. I'm not an academic so I'm not familiar with the feedback process between a journal and a paper's author. Is there any reason that any refinements couldn't take place in public. A version of github focused on academic papers would seem like a good model.
- impendia 15y ago
  There's nothing preventing professors from posting papers to their website or the arXiv. I imagine you could incorporate revisions if you liked. (And my "I imagine", I mean "I did this when I published papers in the past".) This is probably against the letter of the copyright agreement, but I don't give a damn, and AFAIK publishers don't dare go after people who do this.

URSpider94 15y ago

It's my understanding that research done at government labs comes with a similar restriction, and that it's been standard practice for years for these researchers to reserve copyright on their publications. If that's true, then this will give Princeton researchers the leverage they need to retain copyright to their publications. Even though there's theoretically a waiver process, I'm going to bet that most authors won't want to go through that process, since the work is more valuable to them if they retain the ability to distribute it themselves.

jforman 15y ago
Government employees' work by law is in the public domain: "Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government, but the United States Government is not precluded from receiving and holding copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise." (17 U.S.C. § 105) "A 'work of the United States Government' is a work prepared by an officer or employee of the United States Government as part of that person’s official duties." (17 U.S.C. § 101) ...although I disagree that the pressure to give away copyright is weak. At least in the life sciences, the prestige you get from a publication in, say, Nature or Science is far more valuable than the work alone.

robryan 15y ago

I think there still definitely needs to be some sort of filter for academic research. Probably not the journal system anymore but something has to replace it, as most don't have time to trawl through things of questionable quality in the hope of finding something useful.

jsmcgd 15y ago
The existing academic journals could certify only the works that meet their existing publishing criteria, and charge for this service, whilst making all works freely available. No one is restricted, and everyone knows where to go to avoid having to trawl through the dross themselves.
tzs 15y ago
What I think might be good would be something like this. It's based on the notion that being a good researcher and being good at reading and reviewing research papers are not necessarily the same skill. 1. Have a place for open publication, like arxiv.org, but with a system of non-anonymous commenting and rating. So if someone puts a paper there, others can comment on it and rate it. Ratings could include several categories, such as clarity, importance, rigor, and so on. 2. There should be a system to rate the reviewers. 3. Out of this would emerge a growing collection of reviewers who are recognized as being very good at reviewing papers. 4. Reviewers would start publishing lists of papers they have recently reviewed, broken down by field. 5. Scientists would subscribe to these lists from the top reviewers in their field. 6. Reviewing could become a profession. A researcher who wants to make sure his paper gets attention could pay one or more high rated reviewers to review it. Note that for reviewers it is important to maintain a reputation as an accurate and honest reviewer, which I think would be enough of a safe guard against authors being able to buy good reviews for bad papers.
- impendia 15y ago
  This is a good idea, but I think even something much simpler along these lines would work. If arXiv allowed for signed comments, then famous people could say as little as "This is an interesting paper, and everyone interested in X should read it", and that would do a lot for the reputations of unknown people who are doing good work.

ernesth 15y ago

From Springer's "copyright transer statement": An author may self-archive an author-created version of his/her article on his/her own website. He/she may also deposit this version on his/her institution's and funder's repository at the funder request or as a result of a legal obligation... Many publishers have a similar clause. My institution (a french research institute) also requires me to put my publications on their public repository and it does not create problems for journals in CS. Non-false title may be "Princeton bans publishers from handling copyright to journal publishers who ban authors from publishing their articles on their website."

crocowhile 15y ago
The key word here is "author-created version". After publication you are allowed to put a preprint version of your manuscript on your website but you can't upload the PDF of your final paper. Most people do that anyway but it's technically not allowed. Princeton wants to stop this.
- anghyflawn 15y ago
  Again, it varies by publisher. For instance, CUP (at least for the type of journals that I read) allows the author to put up a preprint (before peer review) or a postprint (after review but before editing) on a personal page or the institutional repository immediately on acceptance; once the final version is available on their website (I think), you can also put it up on your own page; and once a year has passed after publication, you can also upload it to the repository. It's not optimal, but it's much better than nothing.
  - streptomycin 15y ago
    It does vary widely from publisher to publisher. Here is a database of publisher policies on this issue: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/ http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/
- ernesth 15y ago
  So that means Princeton requires publishers to hand all their copyright to Princeton? Not that it adds much value but the published article contains the logo of the publisher, some work done by the publisher's typesetters and occasionnaly other copyrighted materials.

movingahead 15y ago

From a student point of view, this is great news. If you don't have a personal subscription to the digital libraries of IEEE/ACM, the amount of hoops that one has to go through to access a research paper, is apalling. I believe that a peer review system used by journals is beneficial, but putting the papers behind a paywall is obstructing access to knowledge. If anyone has a reference which justifies the paywall charges, please share it.

jessriedel 15y ago
I think "appalling" is a bit of hyperbole. I'm for open access, but students at almost every major university can get all the journal articles they want for free at their library. In addition, many/most school have a proxy system so the student can access these resources from home. The situation is a lot worse for the general public, although even then many public libraries have subscriptions to the largest journals.
- pradocchia 15y ago
  students at almost every major university can get all the journal articles they want for free at their library. Some of us have finished school and left the academy, but would still like to read an journal article from time to time.
  - jessriedel 15y ago
    movingahead's comment started with "From a student point of view...", and that was the area I was discussing.
    - pradocchia 15y ago
      From context, he appears to mean "one who studies", rather than "one who's in school."
- Anechoic 15y ago
  > although even then many public libraries have subscriptions to the largest journals. Maybe public libraries in the largest of cities but I've never seen this in libraries in medium-sized (100,000-250,000 people) Massachusetts cities.

chalst 15y ago

With much the same effect, MIT and Harvard have demand the right to make available their researcher's publications, with a similar opt-out clause. The experience is that the opt-out does get used a fair bit in biomed.

a3_nm 15y ago

It's not as good as the title says. The journal publishers will still own the copyright, they will just have to license some rights to the university.

amirhhz 15y ago
From the article: "academic staff will grant to The Trustees of Princeton University “a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise any and all copyrights in his or her scholarly articles published in any medium, whether now known or later invented, provided the articles are not sold by the University for a profit, and to authorise others to do the same.”" That means unless a waiver is given, it doesn't matter what the journal does or thinks, the university can publish the material anyway it likes. A compromise of sorts, but the effect is that more people potentially have access.
- itsnotvalid 15y ago
  If more universities support this kind of policies, the momentum could break the current problem of priced access to results of research that are not in any way, paid by the journal publishers. As indicated by the article, peer reviewers are not paid for that, and so merely the editors are paid in due course. However, charging for the price of what an article needs, is far from what the cost could really justify itself with. Just have a thought, do we really need journal publishers these days? It was once a time we don't have any means than print publishing to exchange views, now we have the series of tubes to do so.
  - william42 15y ago
    The main thing the journals produce is prestige.
    - PotatoEngineer 15y ago
      That, and reliability. You're assured that some kind of peer-review happened, at some point, and that some standards were met. What standards, and what kind of peer review, will differ per journal.

joelthelion 15y ago

The problem with this approach is that smaller universities can't afford to do this. I think this problem needs to be adressed at funding agency level, with funding agencies requiring that all publication be made available on the agency's website.

arohner 15y ago
Why? What are the costs, aside from an http server that hosts PDFs?
- kragen 15y ago
  The cost is that if Podunk University in Podunk, Texas adopts Princeton's policy, Elsevier and Wiley can simply decline to publish anything written by the three Ph.D.s on their faculty. That will make it difficult for Podunk to attract a fourth Ph.D., and even the three it has may choose to give up tenure there in search of someplace they can publish. However, if a few big universities follow Princeton's lead here, that cost will disappear.
Lewisham 15y ago
You might be interested in a rather spirited debate with the head of the ACM here: https://plus.google.com/117898054357703859389/posts/b783VnN45DD https://plus.google.com/117898054357703859389/posts/b783VnN4...
impendia 15y ago
+1 to you, but somebody needed to make the first move, and I think most professors at smaller universities would be happy to publish wherever professors at Princeton are publishing.
- elehack 15y ago
  In some fields, I think this may have huge impact. No math or CS journal would want to be unable to accept Princeton publications. Even if publishers make exemptions rather than change their policies, it sets a precedent that exemptions can be made for institutional requirements.

itsnotvalid 15y ago

I can't say how much I like this ban. For so many times since I left school and wanted to read an article or so, and be greeted with "summary" of that article. I don't really need to pay $25, for the fact that the journal may have obtained the copyright and sold it to some journal sites. We could use some open-source concepts for paper publishing.

davidblair 15y ago
arxiv.org has >700,000 open access articles in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics. It's a great resource. The major cost of a journal is the peer review process, editing, and printing. This can really take a substantial portion of someones time. I don't think it justifies a $25 (sometimes over $40) fee to see an article printed 8 years ago though.
- inuhj 15y ago
  What journal pays scientists to peer review?
- ggchappell 15y ago
  > The major cost of a journal is the peer review process, editing, and printing. Nope, just printing. Peer review is unpaid. In technical fields, at least, editing these days is done by the author (and/or whoever assists at the author's institution) and sometimes by peer reviewers. With LaTeX being standard, the author even does the great majority of the typesetting work. None of these people are funded by the journal. So you are certainly right about the time required; but the people who spend all this time never see that money. Now forget the paper version and just put it all on the web, and we see that an academic journal can be run very cheaply indeed.
  - davidblair 15y ago
    I phrased that poorly. You are absolutely right, peer reviewers are unpaid. I also have a big problem with the fact that journals receive a perpetual copyright to the work instead of it becoming an open license 6-months to a year after publication. Returning to the cost issue. The cost I am referring to comes from paying for the software to manage the peer review process and the time it takes to build the relationships to have enough reviewers available to deal with the first submission and the revision that will almost likely occur. To put out a single issue with 20 articles can easily involve 50 reviewers and at least 40 authors. It is the social science and humanities journals that have real problems with getting papers ready for print. It's easy to only think about scientific journals but the reality is a great deal of researchers only have sufficient computer skills. They will write a professional paper and do the best they can to format it but it isn't anywhere near ready to send to the printers. Large journals can easily cover these costs. Small journals are really struggling to get by. I hear small journal editors talking about how long they will be able to survive. They want to make it work but just don't know how. It's not an easy problem to solve.

impendia 15y ago

Clicking through to the response from Wiley and Elsevier is interesting. Wiley: "Naturally, we are concerned that posting the final versions of published articles in Open Access and institutional repositories lacking viable business models may have an adverse impact on the business of scholarly communication." TL;DR: Universities should continue to pay us, because otherwise we won't make any money.